Tyler Plunkett’s review published on Letterboxd:
Kelly’s brand of pop culture maximalism fails because he continuously mistakes observation for analysis. It does not take a particularly gifted mind to point out American cultural excess. Slapping a Hustler logo on a tank suggests a grotesque connection between our fetishization of the military and obsession with pornography but it remains just that—a suggestion. Kelly offers no sociological or psychological connection between the two.
I think intelligent people flock to this dumb movie largely because they can fill in the gaps that Kelly’s flimsy material leaves. Its legacy as a a quintessential Bush era text was created on the page, not by the film itself. The reactionary politics of Post-9/11 America and the corresponding cultural excess certainly make good bedfellows, but Southland Tales is not a compelling portrait of that connection.
I will say this for Kelly: the movie works best when it dips into the surreal because his strength lies in his pictorial capability, not his ideas.